1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to fingerprint detection, and more particularly to a fingerprint detection device and method and an associated touch control device with fingerprint detection.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Fingerprint detection is one of the most popular biometrics for identity recognition now. Since each person's fingerprint is different, the true identity of a person can be recognized by performing fingerprint detection on him. Fingerprint detection has various advantages in identity recognition, and thus many electronic products have integrated the function of fingerprint detection, such as the notebooks, cellular phones, portable disks, etc.
In order to effectively perform fingerprint detection, the design of a fingerprint detector is a key factor. The detecting area of a traditional fingerprint detector is designed in a strip shape. When a person performs fingerprint detection, he needs to move his finger quickly to achieve sweeping scanning. Then, the generated strip-shaped images should be recombined to generate an entire fingerprint. However, this approach has limitation on the speed of sweeping the finger and the force of pressing the detecting area, and also encounters the problems resulted from uneven touch and image recombination.
Besides, in order to enable a fingerprint detector to detect an entire fingerprint, it usually needs to use multiple detecting units to form a large-area detecting matrix which can generate the entire fingerprint one time, without need to perform the recombination of fingerprint pieces. The capacitive fingerprint detector is a common detector for detecting the entire fingerprint, and its detecting unit can form different sense capacitors when detecting different portions of the fingerprint, i.e. furrow and ridge. By performing data writing and reading operation to the formed sense capacitor, the capacitive fingerprint detector can determine whether the detected fingerprint is the furrow or ridge. Thus, it is very important for the capacitive fingerprint detector about how to use this property to design the detecting unit.